Rabbit at rest (5 page)

VALHALLA VILLAGE: a big grouted sign, the two words curved
around a gold ring of actual brass, inlaid and epoxied-over
to discourage vandalous thieves. You turn in at the security booth,
get recognized by the guard there, park in one of two spaces with
your condo number stencilled right on the asphalt, use your key on
the outer door of Building B, punch out the code number to open the
inner door, take the elevator, and walk to your left. The corridor
is floored in peach-colored carpet and smells of air
freshener, to mask the mildew that creeps into every closed space
in Florida. A crew comes through three times a week vacuuming and
the rug gets lathered and the walls worked once a month, and there
are plastic bouquets in little things like basketball hoops next to
every numbered door and a mirror across from the elevator plus a
big runny-colored green and golden vase on a table shaped
like a marble half-moon, but it is still not a space in which
you want to linger.

With their suitcases bumping the walls of silver and peach and
Janice and Pru still gamely gabbing and little Roy being made to
walk on his own two feet now that he's awake for once and crying
about it at every step, Harry feels they are disturbing a mortuary
calm, though in fact most everybody behind these doors has
contrived something to do in the afternoon, golf or tennis or a
beauty-parlor appointment or a bus trip to the Everglades.
You live life here as if your condo is just home base, a sort of
airconditioned anteroom to the sunny mansion of all outdoors. Stay
inside, you might start to mildew. Around five-thirty, an
eerie silence of many simultaneous naps descends, but at four
o'clock it's too early for that.

The door to 413 has a double lock operated with two keys, one of
which also opens the outer door downstairs. With the impatient mass
of his entire family and its baggage pressing behind him, Harry
fumbles a bit, his hand jumping the way it does when he's feeling
crowded in the chest, his notched key scratching at the wiggly
small slot, but then it fits and turns and clicks and the door
swings open and he is home. This place could belong to one of
millions of part-time Floridians but in fact is his, his and
Janice's. You enter in a kind of foyer, a closet door to the left
and on the right see-through shelves of stained wood Janice
has loaded with birds and flowers she made out of shells in a class
she took that first year down here, when she was still enthusiastic
about shells. Enthusiasm about shells doesn't last, nor does taking
Spanish lessons so you can talk to the help. It's a phase the
greenhorns, the fresh snowbirds, must go through. Baby scallops
make feathers and petals, augurs do as bird beaks, slipper shells
are like little boats. The shelves, which also hold a few of Ma
Springer's knickknacks, including a big green glass egg with a
bubble inside it, separate the foyer from the kitchen, with the
dining room beyond it; straight ahead lies the living-room
area, where they have the TV and the comfortable wicker chairs and
a low round glass table they often eat dinner from, if a show they
care about is on. To the left, a square-armed blond sofa can
be folded out for a bed and a hollow door leads to the master
bedroom, which has a bathroom and a storage area where Janice keeps
an ironing board she never uses and an exercise bicycle she rides
when she thinks she's getting overweight, to Nelson's old tapes of
the Bee Gees that he outgrew long ago. The guest bedroom is entered
off the living room, to the right, and has its own bathroom that
backs up to the kitchen plumbing. The arrangement other years has
been that Nelson and Pru take this room with a cot for the baby and
Judith sleeps on the foldout sofa, but Harry is not sure this
arrangement is still proper. The little ones have grown: Roy
perhaps is too big and observant to share a bedroom with his
parents and the girl is getting to be enough of a lady to deserve a
little privacy.

He explains his plan: "This year I thought we might put the cot
in the storage room for Judy, she can use our bathroom and then
shut the door, and give Roy the living-room sofa."

The small boy gazes upward at his grandfather while his thumb
sneaks toward his mouth. He has a flubby sort of mouth that Rabbit
associates with the Lubells; neither the Angstroms nor the
Springers have bunched-up fat lips like that, like a row of
plump berries run together, but Teresa's father, in the one time
Harry met him, visiting Akron because he went to Cleveland for a
dealer conference anyway, did, if you could see around the two
days' beard and the cigarette always in the guy's fat mouth. It's
as if Pru's worthless creep of a father has been disguised as a
child and sent to spy on them all. The kid takes in everything and
says nothing. Harry speaks down to him roughly: "Yeah, what's the
matter with that?"

The thumb roots in deeper and the child's eyes, darker even than
Nelson's and Janice's, shine with distrust. Judy offers to explain:
"He's scared to be alone in this room all by himself, the
baby."

Pru tries to help. "Sweetie, Mommy and Daddy would be right in
that other room, where you used to sleep before you became so grown
up."

Nelson says, "You might have discussed it first with us, Dad,
before you switched everything around."

"Discuss it, when is there a chance to discuss anything with
you? Every time I call the lot you're not there, or the line is
busy. I used to get Jake or Rudy at least, now all I get is some
fruityvoiced pal of yours you've hired."

"Yeah, Lyle tells me how you grill him about everything."

"I don't grill him, I'm just trying to act interested. I still
have an interest up there, even if you do think you're running it
half the year."

"Ha f
the year! All the year, from what Mom says."

Janice intervenes: "What Mom says is her legs hurt after all
that sitting in the car and she's thinking of moving the cocktail
hour ahead if this is how we're all going to talk for five days.
Nelson, your father was trying to be considerate about the sleeping
arrangements. He and I discussed it. Judy, which would you rather,
the sofa or the ironing room?"

"I didn't mind the old way," she says.

Little Roy is trying to follow the drift of this discussion and
removes his thumb enough for his flubby lips to mouth something
Rabbit does not understand. Whatever he's saying, it makes Roy's
eyes water to think of it.
"Eeeeee" is
all Harry hears, at
the end of the sentence.

Pru translates: "He says she gets to watch TV."

"What a disgusting baby tattletale," says Judy, and quick as a
dragonfly darting over water she skims across the carpet and with
an open hand whacks her little brother on the side of his spherical
head. Pru cuts his hair in a kind of inverted bowl-shape. As
when a faucet gasps emptily for a second after being turned on, his
outrage silences him a moment, though his mouth is open. His yell
when it comes arrives at full volume; against its sonic background
Judy explains to them all, with a certain condescending air, "Just
Johnny Carson sometimes when everybody else was asleep, and
Saturday Night Live
once that I can remember."

Harry asks her, "So you'd rather stay in here with the lousy TV
than have a little cozy room of your own?"

"It doesn't have any windows," she points out shyly, not wanting
to hurt his feelings.

"Fine, fine," Harry says. "I don't give a fuck where anybody
sleeps," and in demonstration of his indifference strides into his
own bedroom, past the king-size bed they bought down here,
with its padded headboard covered in quilted satin and a matching
jade-green coverlet that is as hard to fold up as the ones in
hotels, into the little windowless room and picks up the folding
cot, with its sheets and baby-blue Orlon blanket on it, and
lugs it through the doorways, banging the frames and one of the
wicker armchairs in the living room, into the guest bedroom. He is
embarrassed: he overestimated how fast Judy was growing, he had
wanted to embower her as his princess, he doesn't know little
girls, his one daughter died and his other is not his.

Janice says, "Harry, you mustn't overexert yourself, the doctor
said."

"The doctor said," he mocks. "All he ever sees is people over
seventy-five and he says to me just what he says to
them."

But he is breathing hard, and Pru hastens after him to spare him
the effort of straightening the folding leg, a U-shape of
metal tubing, that has come unclicked and folded underneath, and
pulls taut the sheets and blanket. Back in the living room, Harry
says to Nelson, who is holding little Roy in his arms again, "Now
are you and the brat happy?"

For answer Nelson turns to Janice and says, "Jesus, Mom, I don't
know as I can stand five days of this."

But then when they all get settled - the suitcases
unpacked into bureaus, Judy and Roy fed milk and cookies and
changed into bathing suits and taken to the heated Valhalla Village
pool by their mother and Janice, who has to sign them in -
Harry and Nelson sit each with a beer at the round glass table and
try to be friends. "So," Harry says, "how's the car business?"

"You know as well as I do," Nelson says. "You see the stat
sheets every month." He has developed a nervous irritable habit of
grimacing and hunching his shoulders, as though somebody behind him
might be about to knock him on the head. He smokes a cigarette as
if he's feeding himself something through a tube, constantly
fiddling with the shape of the ash on the edge of a white clamshell
he has borrowed from Janice's collection.

"How do you like the '89s?" Harry asks, determined not to put it
off,
now that he and the boy are alone. "I haven't seen
the actual cars yet, just the brochures. Beautiful brochures. How
many millions you think those ad agencies get for making up those
brochures? I was looking at the Corolla one trying to figure out if
they really
had
driven that sedan and that wagon up into
the mountains or were just faking it, and I had to laugh. The cars
were posed on snow but there were no tracks showing how they got
there! Look at it sometime."

Nelson is not much amused. He shapes his ash into a perfect cone
and then suddenly stabs it out, twisting the butt vehemently. His
hands shake more than a young man's should. He sips his beer,
leaving shreds of foam on his tufty mustache, and, looking level at
his father, says, "You asked me what I thought of the '89s. The
same thing I thought about the '88s. Dull, Dad. Boxy. They're still
giving us cars that look like gas-misers when there's been a
gas glut for ten years. Americans want to go back to fins and
convertibles and the limo look and these Japs are still trying to
sell these tidy little boxes. And not cheap, either. That's what
hurts. The lousy dollar against the yen. Why should people pay
seventeen grand for a GTS when in the same range you can get a
Mustang or Beretta GT or Mazda MX-6?"

"A Celica doesn't cost seventeen grand," Harry says. "Mine back
home listed at less than fifteen."

"Get a few options and it does."

"Don't push the options at people - you get a name in the
county for loading. People come in determined to have a stripped
model, you should sell 'em one without making 'em feel they're
being cheapskates."

"Tell it to California," Nelson says. "Practically all they want
to part with are loaded models. The automatic notchbacks, the
All-Trac Turbos. You want a basic ST or GT, it takes months
for the order to come through. Luxury is where the bigger profit
is, all the way up the line back to Tokyo. You have to try to sell
what they send us - the one machine they make that's really
moving, the Camry, you can't wheedle enough out of the bastards.
They treat us like dirt, Dad. They see us as soft. Soft lazy
Americans, over the hill. Ten more years, they'll have bought the
whole country. Some television show I was watching, they already
own all of Hawaii and half of L.A. and Nevada. They're buying up
thousands of acres of desert in Nevada! What're they going to do
with it? Set off Japanese atom bombs?"

"Don't get down on the Japanese like that, Nelson. We've done
fine riding along with the Japanese."

"Riding along, you said it. Like riding along in the back seat
of a Tercel. You always talk of them with such awe, like they're
supermen. They're not. Some of their design, you get away from the
little safe dependable cheapie family car, is a disaster. The Land
Cruiser is a dog, it doesn't begin to compete with the Cherokee,
and neither does the 4-Runner, it was so underpowered they
had to come with a V-6 engine that turns out to be a guzzler
- fourteen miles to the gallon, I was reading in Consumer
Reports. And
that van! It's ridiculous. Where the engine
is, up between the front seats, the only way to get to the front
from the back is get all the way out and climb back in. In the
winter in Pennsylvania, people don't like to do that. So many
customers have been complaining, I drove one myself the other day
just to see, and even though I'm no giant, boy, did I feel squeezed
in - no foot room to speak of, and no place to put your
elbow. And zilch acceleration: pull into a fast-moving
highway you'll get rear-ended. The wind pushed me all over
422, the damn thing is so tall - I could hardly step up into
it."

That's right, Harry is thinking, you're no giant. Nelson seems
to him strangely precise and indignant and agitated, like a nicely
made watch with one tooth off a cogwheel or a gummy spot in the
lubrication. The kid keeps sniffing, and lights another cigarette,
after not enjoying the one he just snuffed out. He keeps touching
his nose, as if his mustache hurts. "Well," Harry says, taking a
relaxed tone to try to relax his son, "vans were never the bread
and butter, and Toyota knows they have a lemon. They're getting a
total revamp out by '91. How do you like the new Cressida?"